| We've been expecting this question all day long. As fate has it, we have no connection to FB's Prophet - we at Whitesmith have been working on unplugg for some time now and decided a few weeks ago that this week we'd share it on some communities to have more people testing it and more feedback. It seems that the folks over at Facebook decided something similar. You know what they say, great minds :p Joking aside, as intimidating as it might have been to see FB releasing a related tool, we feel that we still fill a different segment. From what I've been reading today, Prophet is a tool tailored for timeseries forecasting with human interaction and input in mind - it can work like a black forecasting box but it seems that it is the most useful when paired with an analyst that can keep looking at the output and tweak the model accordingly. It is _really friendly_ as far as forecasting packages go and trust me, we looked at a fair amount of them. That and the use of ProbProgramming to infer their params is just awesome (I'm a fervent Bayesian at heart). Unplugg on the other hand, fills the need for a "generic" forecasting tool for uses where you don't want/need much specific tailoring and want a really Plug&Play solution - it's an API that you can call from pretty much everywhere, with no dependencies or specific environments needed (so no need to deploy your own R/Python/Matlab - yikes - environment where your models live and run). One possible use case would be an energy monitoring portal that lives completely client-side and requests forecasts to our API on-the-fly directly from the client. We are still actively developing and testing different forecasting models - the one running is just the one we feel most confident about - and will be looking at Prophet as a possible alternative (although I haven't seen their license carefully, so can't be sure). |